


Incipience

by DeepOceanSaint



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Angst, Drinking to Cope, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Original Character(s), Swearing, Underage Smoking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:07:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27790501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeepOceanSaint/pseuds/DeepOceanSaint
Summary: For sixteen-year-old Eliot Waugh, boys are the only source of diversion from his bleak life in rural Eastern Oregon.
Relationships: Eliot Waugh/Original Character(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> About three years ago I posted something online to the effect of “I’d read anything and everything about Eliot Waugh. I’d read his grocery lists if Lev Grossman wrote them”. Since Lev Grossman did not provide any additional content, I took matters into my own hands. 
> 
> This is a backstory for Eliot Waugh: a pre-Brakebills, non-magic story set in eastern Oregon. I’ve tried to stick to the canon as best I can, but it’s probably been about a year or two (or three) since I last read The Magicians, and I’m not that dedicated to the craft to go flipping through it again just to make sure everything I wrote is up to snuff. 
> 
> If you’re reading this, the whole story is complete, which means if you like it, you won’t have to worry about updates coming to an abrupt halt. I’ll be adding a chapter every week or so, maybe even on a schedule. 
> 
> Content warnings: drinking, swearing, smoking, sex, suicide (implied, hypothetical). But if you enjoyed The Magicians enough to seek out fanfiction, presumably you don’t take issue with these things.

A pathetic layer of post-Thanksgiving snow frosted the dead front lawn. In the slanted evening light, it looked remarkably anti-picturesque, uncanny valley-like: all the elements of beauty were there, but the overall effect was cheap. 

Sixteen-year-old Eliot Waugh, locked in the downstairs bathroom, forehead pressed to the pane of the window above the shower, condensation fogging up the glass with every breath, eyed the snow and the rising shadows, and waited for the cut of headlights over the low hill to the west where the road more or less became driveway, if one were generous enough to distinguish asphalt as road and gravel as drive. 

Shouts, masculine and threatening, erupted from the other side of the bathroom door, mixed up with sharp, staccato claps like fireworks; somewhere on a hoarfrosted field across state, the Ducks had scored. 

Bully for them.

Sometime earlier, Ryan had been by, had knocked brusquely on the bathroom door and asked “You wanna join us in here? Mom made a seven layer dip.” 

Eliot had not snapped, “Seven layer dip is baby food for adults,” because it was Ryan at the door and not Carter, or even Mitchell. When relatives visiting for the holidays made jokes like, _wish you’d’a cut back on that chew?_ to Dad with a pointed glance at his youngest, it was Ryan who would snatch Eliot aside and plant a PBR in his hands which was, in his own way, thoughtful. Even if he did it with a smile that he couldn't avoid. 

So rather than bitch at him, Eliot had called back, “Nope,” and lit a cigarette, his fourth of the evening. They were starting to leave a taste in his mouth. “What time is it?” He’d added.

“Third quarter,” Ryan had replied.

Eliot had made eye contact with his reflection in the mirror and huffed. “Unhelpful.”

“Five-twenty-ish,” Ryan had said. Then he’d tried the door handle like he figured it might not be locked. “Anyway, we’re out here….”

(Eliot knew. Eliot had heard. And on that note--how were they not football-ed out? It had been football all week long. Weren’t they tired of it? How did they never get tired of it?)

Anyway, that had been a half hour ago. Or forty-five minutes: when he was bored, time tended to all bleed together. Eliot, frequently bored, was notoriously late to everything. This, he suspected, was largely thanks to Pater Waugh. It was one of the two things they had in common. The other was not so readily apparent, but Eliot had encountered the empirical evidence once, at age thirteen, while standing silent and unnoticed in the doorway of the kitchen, when Eliot had witnessed his father very precisely and particularly fold the dishrag at the corners and settle it neatly in place over the cabinet door beneath the sink. Then, of course, his Dad had turned and seen his youngest and demanded, “The hell you want?”, in his irritatingly patriarchal way, like a bad actor cast in the role of _Gruff Father Figure_. 

Whether it was thirty minutes or three-quarters of an hour was mostly irrelevant. Eileen wasn't going to be home until six-thirty at least, and when she was, she’d sweep in the door, kiss available forehead surfaces of the four men in her life, to various struggles and groans of “Mom, _please_ ,” and then she’d knock once on the bathroom door, call, “Baby? I'm home.” and then retreat to the master bedroom, which meant to spend any time with her, Eliot would either have to wait until the game was over or wade through the swamp of testosterone that was the living room. And his father had thoughtfully invited Billy Waters and his son over, which meant Eliot couldn't even slink through the living room in the decency--more or less--of his own blood relations. When Eliot was eleven, Billy Junior had yelled _fag_ across the playground, apparently in reference to Eliot. It had not been the last time. 

But Billy had also been forced by Mama Waters to learn the piano for church so presumably, he needed some kind of outlet.

When there was a touchdown, Eliot could pick Billy Junior’s bellow of excitement out from the din, because he was distinctly louder than everyone else. It was like he only had one volume-- _forte_ \--and didn't really give a shit about anyone else’s eardrums. At one point, Eliot had clearly heard him in the kitchen, ask, “Where’s your brother?”, to which Mitchell, whose placid, bovine timbre was equally unmistakable, had replied, “Dunno. Somewhere.” 

The window was cold against Eliot’s forehead. He’d left it partially open so the smoke drifted out into the air, and the bathroom had gotten chilly enough to turn his fingernails lavender. It was supposed to snow again during the night, but it would be half-melted and patchy by the morning, even though the mercury would show barely above freezing. School was tomorrow, which meant fast-approaching finals and eight hours in classrooms that smelled like something had crawled in the air ducts and died, and, since there would still be a little bit of snow left on the ground, pathetic attempts at a snowball fight by a couple of the more annoying jocks. 

The whole rigamarole, the going-back-to-school feeling, ever present on a Sunday evening, was especially crushing after a holiday. It made Eliot’s chest hurt, induced heavy, sticky anxiety all over, primed his fight-or-flight response for an impossible flight. 

It made him panic. 

Much of the year had felt this way in fact; not just the thought of going on back to school but the thought of _going on._ Which was a damn shame, as this had been the year things were going to Get Better, just as he’d fiercely told himself the minute after midnight last January. 

Spoiler: things hadn't.

Eliot lit a fifth cigarette--his last--and chucked the empty box overhand, in the direction of the trash can, missing neatly. Someone would find it eventually when they came in to empty the trash. The appetite Eliot had been willing away all evening had finally disappeared, and he got down from the tub in order to stretch, and then rifle briefly through the medicine cabinet for something more thrilling than nicotine. 

At the sound of tires on snow, he was back on the tub, forehead to window, fingers clamped to the ledge. The headlights of the LeSabre blinded him as the car pulled into it’s space beside the rusting John Deere. Eliot quickly got down again, gave himself a once-over in the mirror, and put his hand on the doorknob, waiting. He didn't hedge his way out until he heard the front door, and a chorus of “Mom’s home”s, and the twinkling laughter of Eileen Waugh, back from her Sunday night book-and-knitting club at the Turlake High School cafeteria, which on Thursday and Sunday nights became the Turlake Civic Center. Thursday night was board game night. Sunday night had been movie night, until attendance dropped to basically nil because they wouldn't stop showing _Gone with the_ fucking _Wind_ , after which several of the town’s moms had commandeered the space for themselves. 

Later it had come out that Russ Cutter, who was responsible for both movie choice and operating the projector, was at the back of the audience stroking himself to Scarlett O'Hara, but that was beside the point. 

Eliot heard the soft depression sounds the carpet outside the bathroom made when someone was approaching, and he quickly let himself out and into Eileen’s arms. Eileen’s smile was wide and her dark doe eyes were cheery and empty--Christmas lights strung up on a foreclosed house--and she smelled like summer, warm and fruity. “How’s my baby?” She asked.

The part where he pretended to be embarrassed--this part--had recently started to feel stupid, but Eliot dutifully rolled his eyes and mumbled something like, _Jesus, Mom, whyyagotta…_ Judging by her face, she’d definitely smelled the cigarettes on him, but she didn’t say a word. 

He followed her into the kitchen, her presence like a shield through the living room, waited while she discarded her purse on the piles of mail and newspapers and weekly ads on the table, put the kettle on and went through the fridge for the cranberry sauce, the only Thanksgiving leftovers the Waugh men wouldn't touch. 

“How was it?” Eliot asked. 

"Oh.” Eileen’s voice was cultivated for indifference. “Sharon likes to think her associate’s makes her a literary scholar. Kept pointing out the _symbolism_ of colors. _Just_ colors. 'Gerard’s horse is brown because brown is a deep and misunderstood color, _just like_ Gerard is a deeply misunderstood man’.” Eileen laughed the twinkly, giggly laugh of a woman who kept a bottle of peach schnapps in the glove compartment. “Get the kettle, baby?” 

Eliot reached for mugs and the tea bags in the ceramic pot behind the stove. After he’d poured, Eileen emptied a miniature of Smirnoff into her mug; she called this _taking the edge off._

“What’ve you been up to, baby?” She asked, after tucking the empty miniature bottle back into her purse. “Been reading?” 

Eliot shook his head. “Had homework.”

“Over break?”

Elaborating would have meant explaining the backlog of assignments he hadn't been doing, the piles of essays and worksheets he’d been putting off since day one. At least three of his teachers had told him _if you don't turn in the work, best you're gonna get this semester’s a c-minus._

But since he’d taken and obliterated an SAT freshman year, the amount of fucks Eliot gave was exactly zero.

“Yeah, some,” he told her instead. 

Eileen’s smile was punctuation at the end of a sentence. She split the cranberry sauce into two bowls, passed one to Eliot, then collected her tea and trotted off to the bedroom with a speed and certainty that said _do not follow._


	2. Chapter 2

Most school mornings, Eliot drifted out of dozing to the sound of Ryan turning over in his bed across the room and swearing blearily at the alarm, his voice muffled by the polyester fill of his pillow. It was a familiar, early-morning mantra, an invocation to the Gods of _Fuck This Shit._

Some mornings, the room was heavy with emptiness, on those days when Ryan and Mitchell and Carter had gone off with their father for a weekend hunting trip that had run long and spilled into the school week. Those days, Eliot dragged himself out of bed without the ever-present silent stiffness that was Ryan before a cup of coffee. It was like getting dressed with a grizzly in the room. Unless they wanted to hate each other for the next couple of weeks over one tactless comment or another that snowballed into something more, Eliot and Ryan didn’t speak to each other in the mornings.

_Less gay_ had been the most recent instance, as in, _can you be less gay_?, uttered by a scowling Ryan, who had watched Eliot carefully select and reject a number of different cufflinks in the same time it had taken Ryan to shove himself into a pair of Carhartts, fiddle his belt buckle closed, yank a T-shirt over his head and shrug himself into his favorite camo jacket.

Once upon a time, Eliot and Ryan had settled shit with fist fights, frighteningly one-sided affairs that nonetheless left the both of them bloodied and bruised and both smacked upside the head by their father, who believe equal punishments were supposed to reset the scoreboard, no matter who was the perpetrator and who was the victim. As they got older, though, the fights got less frequent and more harsh. When Eliot got riled up, Ryan would fire back in an instant, but Ryan as an instigator was scary good at zeroing in on Eliot’s _insécurité du jour_ with a single remark, and Eliot tended to retreat behind a wall of solitude and stoicism, until some days later when Ryan would corner him and go, “Dude, are you mad at me or something?”

In the mornings, it was easier just to ignore each other.

When Eliot arrived in the kitchen, last dressed but looking the most presentable--which, to be fair, was not difficult--Ryan was refilling his coffee from the pot on the stove and Carter was standing over the sink, scarfing down a bowl of swampy frosted flakes. Usually, Eliot found it wise to avoid his brothers unless he could catch them one-on-one. Something about having a back-up sibling made their behavior worse.

When Carter noticed him in the doorway, the elder boy rolled his eyes. “That's faggoty,” he intoned, and failed to elaborate. Eliot assumed Carter was referring to the peacoat Eliot’d thrown artfully over his shoulders--it would be cold, but beauty/pain/et cetera--but it could have just as well been a comment about his tasseled smoking slippers, or even his hair style, for Christ’s sake. 

Most of the Waughs had come to terms, as best they could, about Eliot. Carter’s way of working through it was verbally re-confirming it with himself at least once a day. 

“Cool,” Eliot told him. 

\---

Although the state of Oregon had thoughtfully provided the Turlake school district with a school bus, most students lived in town, within walking or biking distance of the squat high school building that sat across a two-lane highway from the 7/11. For the rest of the unfortunates, those students whose families lived out on farms, there was the bus and the twenty minute ride across scrubland, past fallow fields and the occasional livestock behind a falling-down fence. 

When the bus pulled up, Billy Waters Junior was waiting for Carter and Ryan in the second row back, leaning forward with his arms draped over the seatback in front of him.

“Hey, y’all,” he said. “Ain't this shit?”

Carter grunted. Eliot moved past Billy Junior and slid into the empty seat a few places behind him. Except for Billy, the bus was empty. Usually Foster, a plain-faced chick with earbuds perpetually nesting in her ears, could be found lurking in the back, but she’d been complaining about not feeling well before school had let out for break, and presumably was still recovering. 

Not that it would have mattered much. Foster had all the conversation potential of a slab of marble. 

Eliot leaned his head against the window--the perpetual window-leaner, that was him--and closed his eyes. The low note of general shittiness from the night before was still playing, even in the bright light of day. The season change had a hand in that, the fact that the days were quickly closing in on another year ending and Eliot found himself on the same old swaying yellow school bus, cold and tired as ever. 

Ideally, things would be looking up. The Turlake High guidance counselor, an ancient and enthusiastic woman named Shane Dunphrey, had pulled Eliot out of class one day early in the semester to talk about post-graduation, tossing out some names of colleges Eliot might look into. She favored in-states--PSU and Reed, to name a couple--and failed to appear anything less than excruciatingly supportive of Eliot’s sarcastic, “Yeah, Portland State sounds like exactly where I'd want to waste the next four years,” and “Of course my family will have no trouble bankrolling my attendance at university on their ARC subsidies.” 

(There was a reason Mitchell, who had graduated two years previous, had not gone to college, and it wasn't for lack of brains, but rather lack of athletic aptitude. There was supposed to have been a sports scholarship at some point, but Mitchell had never been much of a linebacker.)

So _ideally_ , year after next there would be college and striking out on one’s own and leaving Turlake to fester in its pit of blandness, but wishes and horses and beggars, as the saying went. Eliot figured, realistically, if-- _when_ \--college didn't pan out, one day he’d hop on a Greyhound and fuck the fuck out of Turlake anyway. There was always a big city and the potential to become some rich dude’s trophy husband, if he could ever just get out of Oregon. 

These plans were best not shared with Mrs. Dunphrey.

His biggest question, he supposed, was _how did everyone else do it?_ No doubt the flyover states were chock-full of gay kids trapped in SuburbiaCornHell, and how did _they_ escape? Into the internet, probably. Eliot didn't have a luxury, broadband being shoddy out in fuck-all nowhere and the dusty bank of computer at the school library being at least a decade past their planned obsolescence.

Instead, there were books. Or there _had_ been books. Lately it felt like he was running on fumes, starting novels and leaving them half-finished until they were due back at the library, queuing up long lists labeled “Books To Buy” for the next time the Waughs all piled in the mini van to go visit family in Eugene, and then never quite making it over to the bookstore. Reading, once an easy escape, had become--

Eliot clenched his left thumb deep in his fist, until the knuckle popped.   
  


\---

At lunch, Pierre and Susan found Eliot outside the science classrooms. 

Pierre and Susan were Turlake High School’s resident eccentrics. They weren't related, but the way they clung to each other, they might as well have been. Their friendship was a survival instinct: if it weren’t for each other, their individual weirdness would have relegated them into the lowest circle in the social pecking order, if not into complete obscurity. Susan was the sort of person who read pompous books for the sake of being able to make references no one else understood, and showed up every Halloween in an esoteric costume that she condescended their peers for not recognizing. Pierre tried out a new quirk every few months that usually resulted in a new bizarre school rule, including No Wine Glasses on Campus Not Even For Water, and Dog Collars Are Not Dress-Code Approved. 

The pair would have made an excellent protagonist duo in a young-adult novel. 

“Good break?” Susan asked Eliot, dropping down on to the floor beside him. Pierre squeezed in beside her, and just like that, they were the three weirdo musketeers. 

Eliot was craving a cigarette. For a while, he’d told himself he wasn’t addicted, but the futility of believing that made him anxious, which made him smoke more. It was easier to accept the fact that those Red Ribbon Week rallies had successfully backfired. “That entirely depends on your definition of ‘good’.” 

Pierre, spotting the abandoned brown bag that contained Eliot’s lunch, snatched it up and went rooting through it. “Got anything good?” He asked.

“Same answer,” Eliot said. For Susan’s benefit, he added, “My family spent the whole time watching football.”

“The sport of fucking cretins.” Susan nodded. “I made pot brownies and I had like six, but I didn’t even get high. Like, I just kept eating them, all break, and not once did I get high. I wanted to have the munchies for Thanksgiving, but _nope_. Had to do that shit sober. Can you believe?” 

“Are you gonna eat this?” Pierre held up the saran-wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwich Eileen prepared every morning for each of her sons. Eliot hadn’t eaten peanut butter and jelly in years. He shook his head. If he was hungry later, he’d just sneak off campus and have a cigarette behind the 7/11 across the street.

“Sounds like you did it wrong.” Eliot tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “You’re supposed to cook it with the butter. Did you, like, melt the butter and then simmer it with the weed? You have to make, like, a roux.”

“Oh.” Susan’s voice grew sheepish. “I thought you just… God, no wonder they were gross.”

“Where did you get pot?” Pierre spoke around the sandwich. 

“My older sister’s dating some stoner.” 

Eliot kept his eyes closed. One less sense through which he was forced to accept reality. _Someday…_ he thought. _Someday…_ But that’s where the budding hope collapsed, alongside any residual motivation and ambition. _Someday... what?_

Eliot opened his eyes. “Can you pass me the carrots?” He gestured to the paper bag until Pierre went from confused to understanding, and handed it over. Eliot badly wanted to smoke, but cigarettes on campus was an automatic five day suspension, and he couldn’t risk another five days cooped up at home. Dad would holler about it for forty-five minutes straight, which would exhaust him to the point of needing to collapse in the easy chair in front of the TV for the rest of the evening, and the next four days Eliot would spend in isolation in his room, enduring disappointed glances from Eileen over dinner and brief non-conversations with Ryan before bed. 

But he needed something to put in his mouth, so Eliot settled for a baby carrot. 

A pair of dirt-coated Red Wings stepped up to the three of them, and Eliot tilted his head back and looked up into the face of Parker Herron. He removed the carrot from between his lips. 

“Waugh.” Parker had a tendency to push his chin in the direction of whomever he was addressing--the sudden shove of a non-committal hello--and he did this now. “Been looking for you.” 

“Can’t you just fuck off, Herron?” Susan asked. Susan, being semi-hot and the only girl in their group, could get away with this comment. Eliot or Pierre asking a member of the football team--and a senior, no less--to fuck off was just the same as asking for a quick left-hook to the face, a single punch designed to get the point across. 

Eliot stood up. “What do you want?”

Parker narrowed his eyes. “You know.”

Eliot glanced down at Pierre, who was gripping the peanut butter and jelly sandwich like someone desperately trying to pretend they were not gripping a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the middle of a standoff.

“Not here,” Eliot said.

Parker snorted, but a deep-seated horror flickered briefly in his eyes. “Obviously not here, dumbass.”

“Herron, Jesus Christ,” Susan said. “Do you absolutely have to be a massive dickhead on the first day back? Just leave us alone.”

“Stay out of it,” Parker said, snapping his fingers irritably in her direction. 

Eliot discreetly discarded the carrot as he followed Parker away from the science classrooms, deeper into the bowels of the building. Parker didn't talk. He didn't even look back, assuming without question that Eliot was trailing obediently. 

The janitor’s closet was abandoned during the lunch hour, when the janitors were busy in the cafeteria. They had left the door propped open with a rubber door stop, and country music leaked quietly out from a staticky old radio sitting on a shelf. In the flimsy florescent light, the closet was surprisingly grimy, although it was tidy enough with all the supplies stashed away in appropriately-labeled containers. It smelled like plastic and chemical cleaning solution. The smell set the tempo of Elliot’s pulse to a breakbeat.

Parker shut the door behind the two of them, jamming a mop in place against the door handle, which did not lock from the inside. He snapped the radio off and looked at Eliot.

“You look like a fucking fag with your coat like that,” he said.

Eliot sighed and slung the coat off his shoulders, finding a convenient hook to hang it up and out if the way. “How much time until lunch ends?”

“I don't know. Twenty minutes.” Parker understood the invitation and began to fiddle with his belt buckle. “I've been so fucking horny all break and I couldn’t do anything about it,” he said, finally open to the concept of making conversation. His buckle rattled as he undid it.

“Oh, were your cousins not visiting this year?” Eliot asked.

Parker’s hand came up out of nowhere and— _smack_ —directly across the side of Eliot’s face. Eliot recoiled and drew his hand up, but didn’t quite touch his cheek. Parker returned to his belt buckle. 

“Someday, I’m gonna mess around with someone who doesn’t hit me,” Eliot murmured.

Parker got his zipper down and asked, “Really? What would you even see in him, then?” He dropped his hand to Eliot’s shoulder and added pressure, forcing Eliot to sink to his knees. 


	3. Chapter 3

Eliot heard his name, and ignored it.

Outside the windows of Shane Dunphrey’s office, the last of the Thanksgiving snow had melted, although the ground was still hard and frozen as a slab of stone. Shane Dunphrey's office overlooked what in spring would be a neat little courtyard garden, but during the fall and winter was only another dreary corner of Turlake. Eliot watched a small white feather spin in aimless circles, caught in an air current. A few of the hardier native birds hopped around in the dirt, pecking for grains. 

_Where do hummingbirds go in the winter?_ He wondered. _Do hummingbirds migrate?_

“Eliot?” Shane asked again.

It was second period on Thursday. Time passed so slowly when he was bored. 

“Did you manage to give any more thought to colleges over break?”

Maybe, somewhere along the line, he was supposed to have gotten on a bus. Or a train. Or—the mode of transportation didn't matter, because it was metaphorical. Somewhere, at some indeterminate point in his past, there was a metaphorical vehicle that was supposed to take him back to his real life, and somehow, inexplicably, he’d missed it. Somehow, he’d wound up late, waiting around at the metaphorical station, stuck in Turlake with his hands in his metaphorical pockets, looking around like _well, now what?_

“No,” he said. “It never really came up.”

Shane said _hm_ , the actual word _hm._ “What if I were able to set you up with some interviews? Or maybe got you a tour of a few campuses?”

Eliot leaned back in the creaky office chair. “What percentage of Turlake students actually go to college?”

Shane went _hm?_ again, but this time she hummed it.

“There were two hundred and sixty-six students last year. Fifty-seven seniors. I know of at least two people who dropped out. My brother, Carter, he had to re-take senior year. What percentage of the other fifty-four actually went to college?”

Shane scooted herself closer to the desk, suddenly aware of the importance of the conversation. Her chair creaked, too, and the leather sighed as she shifted her weight. The chain she wore her glasses on swayed on either side of her face with the movement.

“I think about… about eleven,” she said.

“Eleven percent?”

“Eleven students.”

“So, twenty-point-three percent.” Eliot leaned forward. “That’s a failing grade.”

He’d successfully irritated her; her narrow lips formed a line. “We’re not talking about other students here, Eliot. Your SAT scores are phenomenal, you just need to _apply yourself_ \--”

“What colleges?”

“What?”

“What _schools_ did they go to? Eastern Oregon University? DeVry? Rogue Community College?” Too late, he remembered the RCC diploma hanging on the wall behind him, but there was no walking back the derision in his voice.

“Now, there’s _nothing_ wrong with--” 

“When was the last time someone from Turlake went to an out-of-state? Has anyone from Turlake ever gone to an--to an Ivy? Ever?” 

She could have said _An Ivy, Eliot? With your grades?_ But she didn’t; she was still playing nice, despite everything. If maturity meant continuing to be polite to people who repeatedly disrespected you, Eliot decided, then maturity could go fuck itself. “An Ivy League school is not outside of your wheelhouse,” she said. 

“It’s outside of my parent’s savings account.”

Shane held up a couple of fingers, ticked them off. “Loans. Part-time jobs. There are plenty of options.”

Eliot rolled his eyes and sat back. He noticed she hadn’t said _scholarships_. “Forgive me if the thought of scrimping and begging for money doesn't thrill me.”

Shane opened her mouth to reply and was cut off by the sound of the bell. Eliot had successfully wasted an entire period in her office.

When the bell went quiet, Shane knitted her fingers together on the desk in front of her. “For someone like you, Eliot, an education is priceless.”

He grabbed his bag and stood up. “Tell that to the fucking bank.”

  
\- - -  
  


_Fucking bank_ earned Eliot an hour’s worth of detention. 

Detention meant missing the bus, which on most days meant a cold, two-hour walk home, usually barefoot if the thought of ruining his shoes was more painful than the asphalt underfoot. But on Thursdays and Fridays, Eileen waited tables until close at Nibbley’s downtown, and she’d have the car with her if Eliot was willing to wait for her shift to end. 

When he came in from the cold, Nibbley’s was full of the town’s resident population of old folks, whose idea of a night out was dinner at four-thirty in the afternoon at the closest thing Turlake had to fine dining. Eliot waved to Monica, waiting behind the pastry case, and then took a table in Eileen’s section, by the window with the neon _Open_ sign. 

The restaurant was maybe a quarter full, but Eileen was nowhere to be found, which meant she was probably in the kitchen fetching an order, or else standing on the stoop out back having a cigarette. Eliot put his head down on the table to wait for her, and pretty soon Monica came by with a menu, a cup of coffee, and a friendly, “Howya doin, honey? Your mom’s just on her break but I’ll let her know you’re here.” Her dimples appeared when she smiled, and the wrinkles in her face deepened. Monica was the daughter of the original owners of Nibbley’s, and she’d worked in the restaurant every day since she was sixteen. There was a picture behind the register of Monica posing proudly with her parents on her first day on the job. She’d been kind of hot, six decades ago. Now she was grey-haired and sway-backed and shuffled around in Dr. Scholls brand shoes, perfectly content with how her life had turned out. 

That was what Turlake did to people. 

Eliot smiled, thanked her, and drew the coffee closer as she walked off. He’d had a cigarette on the way over, and Nibbley’s coffee was the best chaser to nicotine.

The sugar container sitting at the end of the table had been freshly topped-off, and Eliot helped himself to a full spoonful, and was just stirring it in when Eileen appeared, swooping in to plant a kiss on his forehead. “Hi, baby,” she crooned. “What’re you doing here?”

“I had detention,” Eliot said. 

Disappointment settled over her features, and her eyes fluttered towards the window. She propped her hands on her hips, wrists up. “Eliot,” she said. 

In family pictures, the elder Waugh boys appeared as slight variations on their father; the four of them--Pater Waugh included--were broad and thick, tall but not remarkably so for their brawn. They even dressed alike, in flannels and camo and canvas Carhartts. In pictures, they were a bouquet of manliness, the paragon of masculinity. And then, off to the side: Eliot and Eileen, looking like members of an entirely different species. Tall, gangly, dark-haired, matching facial features--except for Eliot’s jaw, which he shared with his father. The two of them looked like they’d been added into family pictures as an afterthought. 

Sometimes Eliot liked to pretend he was his mother’s only. When the rest of the Waugh clan was out on a hunting trip and it was just Eliot and Eileen home, it felt like everything was as it should be. The house was quiet, the TV stayed dark, and it finally felt like there was space to breathe. On those weekends, Eliot’s favorite thing to do was curl up on the couch across from his mom and read for hours on end while Eileen did crosswords or crocheted or paged through whatever novel her book club was on that month. 

Now, she clutched her half-apron with both hands, briefly, like she was drying them off, and then slid in the seat across from Eliot. “Was--was it a fight? Were you fighting again?”

Eliot shook his head. 

The first time he’d brought up college, Eileen had done her strange happy/sad smile and said, “I don’t know how we could afford that, Eliot…” and then, having watched his face fall, she added, “Well, now. I could ask Monica if I could go full-time. Could probably save up something from that. Do you think that would help, baby?”

He hadn’t mentioned it again. And he wasn’t going to mention it now.

“Apparently you’re not supposed to say ‘fuck’ at the guidance counselor.” 

Eileen maintained her look of disappointment for only a moment longer before rolling her eyes and getting to her feet. “‘Fuck’? Is that all? Detention for ‘fuck’? Making you miss the bus for a curse word. _Lord_.” She looked around for a moment, then back at Eliot. “Do you want to call your father and have him come pick you up? Or Mitchell? Or you could wait until my shift is over. I don’t want you walking home in just that.” She gestured to his clothes, the most weather-appropriate of which was a wool cardigan. 

“I’ll wait. I’ve got a book.” 

Eileen scooped the menu up off the table. “Sure, baby. How about I bring you something to eat?” 

When she left, Eliot turned to the window and gazed out at the dark plane of asphalt that was Nibbley’s parking lot. It had grown riddled with cracks over the decades, and the white paint marking the spaces was chipped and fading under years of sun and snow. The lot was about half full, because it was the best place to park if you were going to be downtown, and Monica had complained for years, even put up signs telling people they couldn’t park in the lot if they weren’t dining at Nibbley’s, but it had never done much good. 

Downtown Turlake was a single street, a quarter-mile stretch of low-slung buildings, most of which were family-owned restaurants, their facades all bleached by the sun. From his vantage point, Eliot could see a stretch of the interstate, seven or eight miles away, with a line of semis crawling their way north. 

At home, the Waugh men would be microwaving whatever casserole Eileen had stuck in the refrigerator that morning for dinner, the way she did on work nights. Then it would be homework and chores and football until it was time to go to bed. At some point, Dad would say _where’s Eliot?_ And Ryan would look up from his plate only long enough to go _he got detention_ . If Dad were in a particularly good mood, he’d look up to the ceiling and go _I swear to fuckin’ God._

Across the restaurant, Eileen was refilling an old man’s coffee cup from the decaf pot. Monica was making change at the register. Cathy, the other woman who worked the Thursday shift, was just finishing up taking an older couple’s order, and Eliot watched her stash the notepad in the pocket of her apron before heading off for the kitchen. Nibbley’s was a realm of women, a place that radiated warmth and maternal instinct. A tiny pocket universe tucked safely away from the rest of Turlake. For a brief flicker of a moment, Eliot felt as though he could have stayed there forever.

  
\- - -

On the drive home, Eliot leaned his head against the passenger side window of the LeSabre and listened to Eileen hum quietly along with the radio. She drove with the high beams on once they were outside of town, picking up speed on the empty highway. 

When they’d left Nibbley’s, stepping out into the icy night, Eileen had offered Eliot the keys with an unspoken question on her face, and Eliot thought of the learner’s permit he’d earned that summer but hadn’t been getting much use out of since then. He’d shaken his head and climbed into the cold passenger seat, and wondered if there was some pointed metaphor to be found in not wanting to be the one to drive.

Now, he lifted his head from the window and said, “Do you know if Monica’s looking for more help?”

Eileen turned the radio so low it might as well have been off. “At the restaurant?” Eileen didn’t say _Nibbley’s_ if she could help it, and Eliot didn’t blame her. “Well now, I’d have to ask her.”

When he said nothing, she was quiet for a few extra moments, an expectant silence. Then: “Why, baby? Were you thinking about a job?”

He shrugged, thought of Shane Dunphrey, thought _an Ivy League is not outside your wheelhouse,_ and said, “Maybe.”

A figure appeared out of the darkness, a man ambling down the side of the road with his thumb stretched out beside him, and then they’d flashed by him and he was swallowed by the night. Eliot turned his head towards the window, watching the place where the man had disappeared. Outside the car, the temperature was below freezing. 

Eileen didn’t react. “I think,” she said, in the tone she only adopted she was going to say what she thought was the right thing to say, even though they both knew it wasn’t, “we should talk to your father about it.” 

“Why?” Eliot asked, turning back to her. 

Eileen didn’t reply, which was a more effective tactic when she could also physically remove herself from the conversation. 

Eliot leaned his head back against the window. 

A small group of deer lingered around the front of the house when Eileen pulled up into the yard a few minutes later. They skirted the headlights, the fawns ambling clumsily ahead of their mothers. Only the largest one didn’t move, instead lifting its antlered head and turning to stare at the car with dark, guileless eyes. 

Most of the house lights were off, but the flickering blue luminescence filtering out from the living room window suggested that at least some of the Waugh men were still awake. Eileen cut the engine and let herself decompress with a long sigh. Eliot sat and watched the deer, willing himself to put his hand on the door latch and let himself out into the cold, let himself into the stagnant air of the house. His mother seemed to be doing the same. 

“Baby, I don’t want you working at the restaurant,” she said, suddenly. 

Eliot looked over at her, but said nothing, worried that if he cut her off she’d give him an abbreviated, enigmatic answer in reply, and then flee into the house and shut herself in her room. 

But instead of elaborating further, she only reached over and put her hand on the back of his neck, smiling the happy/sad smile that appeared on her face only at graduations and birthdays and the sight of Eliot’s SAT scores. Then she popped the door open and scooted out of the car, scattering the deer off into the darkness. 


	4. Chapter 4

On Saturday, Eliot dragged his bike out of the shed behind the house and set off for town. 

Saturdays were the day Eileen attacked the mountains of laundry that piled up over the course of the week, and Eliot left the house in jeans and a t-shirt and an old fleece hoodie that no longer fit. Its cuffs stopped several inches above his wrists, so it felt right to push them up to his elbows and endure the icy sting of the air on his exposed skin. 

It was a clear day, but only slightly warmer than it had been all week. Mid-morning sun spilled across the flatlands of scrub brush, illuminated the distant bruise-colored hills in sepia gold. In places where the land had been tamed and cultivated, winter-fallow fields stretched out like cemeteries, detritus of the season’s crops disintegrating in the furrows. 

The freezing wind in Eliot’s face forced tears from his eyes, blurring the world into an impressionistic version of itself. It was forty-five minutes into town on a bike, and by the time he arrived, he could feel his face and fingers turning numb. He locked the bike up at the rack outside the Turlake public library, a sad little building that resembled a monastery, and crossed the street to the drug store. 

Only a handful of people were up and about, and the drug store parking lot was empty except for an old rust-brown Volvo, with a pitbull that watched Eliot anxiously from the passenger seat. 

A hobo was situated on the concrete out front the store, his back to the cement facade, wrapped up tightly against the cold. Turlake was small enough that homeless people were next to non-existent, but sometimes younger transients passed through on their way to Ashland or Portland--preferable locales--and Eliot thought of the hitchhiker from a few days previous. The man sat with his hood pulled low to hide his face. Beneath his hands was a mangled sketchpad, on which he was drawing with an assortment of brightly-colored gel pens; the vibrant shades stood out against the greys and browns of his clothes. 

The sensor above the door pinged as Eliot slipped into the drug store, and he felt his face instantly warm. 

A low Christmas-y sounding jingle piped from the store’s intercom system, and Eliot inhaled the overpowering smell of the scented candles section. 

The store owner-- _ Mark - proprietor _ , his home-made name tag said, although everyone in Turlake already knew that--popped his head around one of the aisles, spotted Eliot and said, brightly, “Hello!” and Eliot reflexively repeated him in the same irritatingly ebullient tone.

_ Someday,  _ Eliot thought,  _ I’m gonna cure myself of small-town friendliness.  _ Nothing was more hick than enthusiastically greeting strangers. Not willful ignorance, not a fetish for the second amendment, not even meth. Nothing said  _ fuck with me, I'm totally naive  _ like “Howdy, neighbor!”

“What’d you need?” Mark asked. 

“Browsing,” Eliot said, automatically, and regretted it. Who browsed in a drug store? He forced a smile and ducked into another aisle to avoid further conversation. 

“Alright!” Mark called after him. “Just holler when you need me to ring you up.”

Eliot ignored him.

At the front of the store, displayed openly on shelves behind the counter, rows of cigarette packs waited to be shoplifted. That the cigarettes were not locked up in cases or watched over by security cameras was, Eliot figured, one of the perks of a small town. Or maybe it was a consolation.

He stood and eyed the shelves and wondered if they were out of sight from where Mark was noisily unboxing the latest shipment of shampoos. The sound of a box cutter tearing through packaging tape and the scruffing of cardboard flaps coming apart were methodical, but it took just one glance in the direction of the counter--or an unexpected customer setting off the door sensor--to get caught. 

For a few minutes, Eliot stood around in the chips aisle, reading nutrition labels and waiting for the right opportunity.  _ Jingle Bell Rock _ came on over the intercom system, and the next aisle over, Mark began to sing gruffly as he worked. 

Finally, mercifully, the sensor over the door pinged and after the exchange of salutations, and the store owner’s  _ what can I help you find today? _ a guy’s voice asked, “Yeah, you got stuff for athlete’s foot?” Eliot recognized the voice, but not enough to care, because Mark went, “Sure do,” and two pairs of footsteps headed towards the aisles in the back. 

Eliot moved quickly, crossing to the front of the store and boosting himself over the counter. Two packs of Merit Ultra Lights came down from the shelf, easy as fruit from the forbidden tree. He was out of the store a minute later, his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his jacket, each fist wrapped around a pack. 

He retrieved his bike and was pedaling back up to the front of the drug store as Holden Novik stepped out clutching a can of Tinactin. When Holden spotted Eliot riding up, he narrowed his eyes for just a fraction of a second, and then said, “Hey Eliot.”

Eliot hit the brakes, executing a show-offy skid, and dropped his feet to the pavement. “Hey.”

For a brief second, the transient looked up, and Eliot caught a flash of blonde hair and the crooked nose of someone who had seen their fair share of fights, before the man ducked his head again. 

“So,” Holden said, the way people did when they didn’t know how to start a conversation, but thought they ought to.

Holden was a senior this year, and vice president of Turlake High’s FFA chapter. He had the perpetual sunburned face of a white boy who spent all his time outdoors, and he was smart enough to shave instead of pretending the six hairs produced above his upper lip constituted a moustache, the way the resident population of Turlake High males tended to. 

He squinted at Eliot and said, “Haven’t seen you around much lately.”

“I’ve seen you,” Eliot said. 

Holden sniffed and maybe smiled, but it was gone in an instant.

“Are you still dating Carly?” Eliot asked, already knowing the answer, but asking anyway to tuck a deeper implication beneath the banality of the question.

“Nah, she, uh, she’s going with Jacob Harly these days.”

Eliot knew Jacob. Or  _ had _ known him. The last time they’d interacted, Eliot had been twelve and Jacob Harly had been stomping the shit out of his ribcage. Jacob Harly was not above kicking a man when he was down and nor, it seemed, stealing another man’s girl.

“That’s not gonna last,” Eliot said. “ _ Carly Harly  _ has a terrible ring to it.” 

Holden smiled, and this time it stayed. Eliot felt a tug deep in his stomach.

Holden jammed the receipt he was holding into his back pocket. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothing, now.” 

“Catch up?” Holden offered. He gestured off behind Eliot. “You can toss your bike in my truck.”

Together, they leveraged Eliot’s bike up in the bed of the orange F350 Holden had been driving around for the past two years, and then Eliot climbed up into the dusty cab, swatting a cobweb off the back of the seat. The two of them left town with Holden driving one-handed, his other arm hanging out the open window. The wind chill was considerable, but the window stayed down, Eliot suspected, because the rush of air into the cab made it impossible to hold a conversation. 

- -

They fucked in the pile of musty hay in the old barn on the Novik’s property. 

Eliot, on his stomach and grasping at loose handfuls of straw, gave brief thanks to the miracle of oversexed teenage guys without any really good, consistent outlets for their horniness. Among a not-insignificant portion of the quote-unquote heterosexual farmer boys, Eliot was unsurprisingly popular; he was something you could stick your dick in without impregnating, and unlike most of Turlake High’s population of girls, he didn’t squirm away from anal. 

Still, it had been a while since Holden. Five months, easy. Only slightly before Carly had entered the picture. 

He could feel Holden’s breath on his neck, and he rose up to his elbows, turned his head as much as he could. Holden’s face was inches away, a fleck of saliva sitting on his lower lip. When Eliot leaned close to suck it off, Holden shoved Eliot’s head away, roughly, and broke his rhythm to put some space between them. 

“Jesus, dude,” he said. “Don’t fucking try to kiss me. Haven’t you ever heard of consent?” 

Eliot turned away, rested his head against the straw, ignoring the stale smell of it and the way it stabbed against his skin, and took the rest of Holden’s fucking wordlessly, although not altogether soundlessly. 

Eventually, Holden climbed off him with a deeply satisfied, exhausted sigh, and settled back against the hay. Eliot sat up, carefully adjusting his clothes back to something that resembled presentable, at least from all outward appearances. For the first time, he realized how chilly it was in the barn. His fingers felt stiff and chapped, and it hurt to bend them. He reached into one of his pockets and pulled out the Merits and offered them towards Holden. “Smoke?”

Holden nodded, tore the cellophane off the pack and produced a lighter. Eliot stuck one of the cigarettes between his lips and leaned forward so Holden didn’t have to stretch to light it for him. 

For a bit, they sat there and smoked together in silence. Holden held the crumpled cellophane in his fist, squeezing it so that it crackled. When he finished the cigarette, he flicked it into the soft dirt that lay thick on the barn floor and said, “Merits are for pussies.”

Sex with straight guys was so gratifying, Eliot suspected, because they never wanted to talk about it after the fact. Bringing it up now would tear into Holden’s ego like it was wet paper. Holden may have been topping, but he’d ceded all power over to Eliot, and so Eliot kicked back, crossed his legs at the knees and said, “Got anything better?”

Holden shook his head. 

Eliot  _ hm _ ed like  _ well, then _ . 

Holden watched Eliot smoke for a moment or two, then collected a handful of the hoary straw and let it slip out between his fingers. “Well, you should probably get out of here.”

“Yeah, in a sec.” 

Holden shot him a curious, helpless look. Eliot inhaled a lungful of smoke and let it drift back out between his lips. The boyish, jejune crush he’d been harboring for Holden had evaporated, the way his crushes tended to once they’d had him. The fact remained that the best way to get over a guy was to get under him.

(His feelings about Holden, Eliot knew, would be back in due time, as persistent and overwhelming as a fungal infection. It was something about Holden’s quaint, all-American-male-ness. Eliot couldn’t get past it.) 

Sometime back in September, during the first or second week of school, Eliot had had the misfortune of crossing paths with a group of his peers hanging outside the gym. A posse of lacrosse players, or maybe basketball; the sport hadn’t really mattered, because they weren’t football players, which meant according to the social pecking order, they weren’t worth remembering. Eliot had tensed, instinctively, fortifying himself for the off-hand comments. But when his passing only garnered a single, half-hearted and unenthusiastic, “ _ Faggot _ ,” he’d looked again and realized with a start that at one point or another, he’d blown all but one of the guys in the group.

_ Boycrazy, _ Eliot thought, flicking his cigarette into the dirt near where Holden’s lay smoldering.  _ I’m boycrazy. _

“You good now?” Holden asked. 

Eliot nodded. “Go check the coast is clear.” 

Holden slipped out of the barn. Once he was alone, Eliot got out of the hay to retrieve the butt of the cigarette so he could use it to light another one. 


	5. Chapter 5

“I had strep,” Foster said on Tuesday morning.

Eliot hadn't asked. He’d seen Foster in the back of the bus and absently remarked, “You're back,” and, in doing so, had apparently initiated a conversation. Now, he rested his head against the window as the bus swayed off down the road, and wondered how to end it.

“Yikes,” he said. 

“You ever had strep?”

“Never had the pleasure.”

“It's not a fun time.” Foster rested her arms on the seatback and leaned in. “You wouldn't call it a pleasure if you had it.”

Was it worth the energy to explain sarcasm to her? Eliot figured not.

Foster had tugged one of her headphones out when Eliot had first spoken, and now she pulled the other one out as well. _Oh, boy,_ Eliot thought.

“I thought I was dying. It was...so bad.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, like, I was running a fever…. I was _super_ exhausted… had this really bad sore throat…”

“Damn.”

“So anyway, that’s why I wasn't here.”

Eliot turned to look at her, finally. “It’s like, two more weeks until winter break. You really should have held out.”

“Oh, huh.” Foster popped one of her headphones back in, looking thoughtful. “Damn,” she said, and turned around in her seat. 

Eliot leaned his head back against the window. Somehow, impossibly, the cigarettes he’d shoplifted on Saturday morning were gone. He’d remembered tossing the empty first pack on Sunday afternoon, thinking _I should really pace myself_. 

It was probably a good thing he’s been skipping Phys Ed all semester. At this point, one slow jog around the track would leave him heaving in the grass. 

By the time he’d pedaled home from Holden’s on Saturday, it was late afternoon, the daylight already melting into evening the way it did after the time change. The house had smelled like fresh linen, and Dad and Mitchell had been in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and having a couple of beers when Eliot let himself in. 

Eliot had wanted a shower and maybe something to eat and a nap, but he could tell by the way Mitchell abandoned a sidelong glance to raise his bottle to his mouth that it would be a while before any of that. 

First, Dad had provided a litany of Eliot’s latest transgressions: _Detention, Eliot, really? For fuck’s sake…And your grades these days, what about those?_ Then it had been a fight, and they’d both been yelling because Eliot had discovered years before that his preference for stoic silence only extended the ordeal. Then Eliot had gone into his room and slammed the door which triggered more yelling and Ryan, reading on his bed, given Eliot a dark look, as though to say _why’d you have to bring the fight to me?_ At some point, Eliot had made the mistake of using the word _college_ and by then Eileen was involved, and she understood why he’d been asking about Nibbley’s the week before and she had retreated into herself and then into her bedroom. 

By the time it had all blown over, it was late evening and the mood in the house was tense and thick and uncomfortable. Eliot, feeling miserably responsible and irritated that he felt responsible, had crawled out his bedroom window and sat smoking on the roof, until Ryan had come out to sit beside him with his arms around his knees, and said, “You’ve really got to stop provoking him.” That had hurt worse than anything Dad had said, but also it was sort of what he expected from Ryan. 

Maybe that was why it had hurt so much. People didn’t have to change to let you down; they did that perfectly well by being exactly who they always were.

\- -

When the third-period late bell rang, Eliot ducked out of the second-floor boy’s bathroom and crossed the hall to slip into the library. 

Ms. Wallace was in her office behind the desk, and she didn't look up when Eliot came in. Even if she had, the most she would have done would be offer a tense smile; Eliot still hadn't figured out if she was a willing ally for students skipping class, so long as they spent the time in the library, or if she was just really, really bad at confrontation. 

Eliot suspected he had the library to himself, but when he’d wandered into the stacks, he noticed Willow Balsy sitting on the floor in the corner behind the stacks, deep in a book.

Willow was fat, and Eliot was used to seeing her around with her thin friends, awkwardly pushing the sleeves of her hoodie up her arms, and sometimes even managing to look unselfconscious while she did it. She’d taken the brunt of bullying in middle school for daring to have a last name like _Balsy_ , which was absolutely ripe for tormenting. 

She looked up when she sensed him approaching. “Hey,” she said softly. She’d had an orange recently; the air smelled like citrus, one long loop of a discarded peel lay on the floor beside her, and the tips of her fingernails were yellow. 

Eliot raised his chin for a second in greeting, then thought of Parker and murmured, “Hey.”

Willow dove back into her book. Eliot wandered into the next row of shelves. In the silence of the library, he could faintly hear the hum of heater spilling warm air out from the floor vents, and the sound of Willow’s shoes scuffing against the industrial-grade, one-ply carpet every time she readjusted. When he came to the end of the row, he glanced over at Willow again. She must have sensed what he was doing; the plastic-film cover crackled as she switched her grip on the book so he could catch the title, but Eliot didn’t recognize it. He ducked into the next row. 

Maybe reading wasn’t like breathing; maybe it was just like any other hobby, and interest in it could ebb just like interest in everything else did, constantly, like a moonless tide. Eliot briefly touched the spines of several books, even hooked his fingers around one as if to pull it off the shelf before deciding against it. Losing interest in books was like losing a limb. 

Eventually, he settled on a battered old copy of _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,_ more to have something to do with his hands and his eyes than to read. 

When he passed by Willow on the way to finding a comfortable place to hole up for the next forty-five minutes, he heard her murmur, _wow_ , and stopped. 

“What?” He asked. 

She shook her head. “You kinda...no. Sorry.” Her face blossomed red, and she seemed to realize the only way out was through. “No. Uh. Uhh...you kinda just don’t seem like. Like, _Harry Potter_? Like, huh. Wouldn’t have figured. You.” 

_Is that what_ I _sound like when_ I _talk to people?_ Eliot wondered. “Yup,” he said. “Harry Potter.” 

“Sorry,” she said again, and ducked back down into her book. 

Eliot rolled his eyes, gave the rest of the library a cursory once-over, and then settled down on the carpet across from Willow, his back to the bookshelves. She looked up at him again. “What are you doing?” She asked. 

“Why don’t you figure me for _Harry Potter_?”

“Oh. God.” Willow aborted an eye-roll halfway through. “Um...you know. You’re like _Brideshead Revisited._ Alan Hollinghurst.” She shrugged. “Poetry.” 

“The romantics, I hope.” It came out sounding decidedly more miffed than he’d intended.

This time, she managed to complete the eye-roll. “Exactly,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

He gestured at the book in her hands. “What’s that?”

It was _Slouching Towards Bethlehem_ , essays by Joan Didion. It was--Willow’s words-- _pretty good_ . “It makes me wish I were in Cali,” she said. “Every time I read it, I’m like _God, someday I’m gonna move to Cali._ My aunt’s from there. From L.A. She says I can come live with her if I get accepted to UCLA. But that’s...you know.” Her shoulders sagged a little as her enthusiasm deflated. “Two years.” 

“This place sucks,” Eliot said, experimentally.

“This place _sucks_ .” Willow added considerable emphasis. “Does it ever freak you out that no one else seems to get that? This place _sucks_.” 

It did freak Eliot out. It freaked him out that Susan and Pierre, who themselves seemed too much for small-town Turlake, never seemed to be bothered by their surroundings. Maybe Pierre was secure in the knowledge that he’d get into NYU one day. Maybe Susan knew the morning after graduation she was gonna stick her thumb out on the highway and spend the next ten years of her life tripping and roadtripping with whatever hippies happened to scoop her up. Eliot didn’t know, because they never really talked about the future, just like they never really talked about feeling like their ambitions and lives were belittled and stifled by the very nature of Turlake, Oregon.

And Willow had gotten to the heart of the matter in two minutes, despite the fact that this was the longest conversation Eliot had had with her since they’d peer-reviewed each other’s English papers in Ms. Klemann’s class freshman year. (Willow had said, looking at his essay, “You know ‘refudiate’ isn’t a word, right?” and Eliot, who had written the damn thing at four a.m. that same morning, had been so mortified that he’d made considerable effort to not get paired up with her again.) 

“What class are you skipping?” Eliot asked.

“Algebra with Bender.” Willow pulled a face, and Eliot knew why. Girls had a tendency to skip Mr. Bender’s class, and those who couldn’t afford the mark on their attendance record went in armored with oversize hoodies. Eliot had taken Algebra with Bender for the first half of freshman year, before someone in the Turlake High administration realized he was vastly ahead of the rest of the class, and bumped him up to pre-calc for second semester, where he wasn't privy to watching Bender repeatedly drop a dry erase marker and ask one of the girls seated in the front row to bend over and pick it up while smiling so wolfishly he might as well have had tendrils of saliva dripping from his lips.

“What about you?” Willow asked.

“Also math.” Eliot suspected the moment they’d shared over their mutual disgust for Turlake was over, and he was rapidly growing bored again. “Have you ever completely left campus? Skipped class and just left?” 

“Uh...no. Have you?”

He was definitely, absolutely, one-hundred-percent back at rock bottom of the pit of boredom, and this conversation had become the equivalent of grabbing a shovel and digging. He nodded. 

“What do you do?” She’d stuck a bookmark in her place in _Slouching Towards Bethlehem_ , gearing up for an actual conversation, and Eliot regretted getting to his feet when she looked up at him with an expression like he’d betrayed her because she’d fully set aside her book for him.

“Just whatever,” he said, and discarded _Harry Potter_ on one of the nearby shelves, indicating _I’m done here._

“Oh,” Willow said. “Okay.” She picked up her book again and retrieved her bookmark. “Uh. Good talking to you.”


	6. Chapter 6

Eliot pointed at the security cameras. “Those are new.”

They were installed in the corner behind the counter, facing the shelves of cigarettes, when he’d come into the drug store. Mark was perched on a stool behind the register, flipping through a copy of _Reader’s Digest_ . He’d decked his nametag out with little illustrations of Christmas trees and wreaths.

“Oh?” Mark asked, lowering the _Digest_ and glancing over his shoulder. “Oh. Oh, yeah. God, I tell ya. I didn’t want to have to, but I keep losing cigarettes. Someone keeps coming in and taking ’em. Snatching them right off the shelf. Can you believe it?” His smile was totally, cluelessly genuine. 

Eliot’s hands went numb. It had been a week since Holden--or, at least, a week since the interlude in the barn, Holden himself proving to be just as insatiable as Eliot remembered him--exactly a week since Eliot’d been here last, _hello_ ’ing Mark and then leaving without making a purchase. 

But Mark didn’t seem to be making that connection, because he changed the subject: “Well, son, what can I do for you?” 

There was a box of Doublemint gum sitting next to the register, and Eliot picked one of the packs out and placed it between them on the counter. 

“Just the gum, then?” Mark continued, not seeming to realize the conversation had become a monologue. He scanned the gum and exchanged it for a couple of loose dollar bills Eliot fished out of his pocket.

Back outside in the freezing, arid air, Eliot shoved the gum in his pocket and wished for a fucking cigarette.

Nearby, that hobo from the previous week was still in the same spot, still hunched over his sketch pad, shaking one of his gel pens like he couldn’t get the ink to come out. Probably it had frozen in the chamber. He’d found a scarf some time in the past seven days, and it was wrapped a number of times around his face. Between that and the hood, only his eyes were visible. He must have sensed Eliot watching him, because he looked up. 

Eliot made a decision. “Hey,” he said, stepping up to the hobo, who didn’t move except to watch him, even when Eliot came to a stop only a foot or two away from him. Even standing over him, Eliot felt small and easily scrutable under the hobo’s hard, eerie gaze. The sketch pad under his hands featured an elaborate, shimmering mandala. 

“What,” the hobo said. His voice was muffled, and the scarf moved a little with his mouth. 

“Can you--could you--could you get me a box of cigarettes?” Eliot included a gesture, raising two fingers to his mouth like the hobo might not know what he was talking about, and was immediately awash in stupidity.

The hobo looked at the automatic doors of the drug store, then back at his mandala. He shook his gel pen. “No,” he said. 

“Obviously I’ll pay for them,” Eliot said. “I could even--you could even get one for yourself.”

“Don’t smoke.” The hobo said, his tone indicating he was referring to himself, not instructing Eliot on what substances Eliot should or should not be putting into his body. He had a hick accent. West Virginian. A coal miner’s accent.

“Okay--I’ll _give_ you money to do it. I’ve--I’ve got a ten, you can keep the rest.” Eliot produced the bill, and the hobo eyed it briefly, then returned to the mandala, adding a delicate stroke of green on to one of the petals. 

Eliot put the money away, feeling a dark spot of anger growing in his chest. Anger at his sudden inability to get a pack of cigarettes. Anger at his dependence on them. Anger at his anger.

“Please,” he said, crouching down so he was level with the hobo. _Excellent,_ he thought grimly. _Now we’re begging._ “Please, I’m--I’m--” _Begging you_ would have rolled right off the tongue, but Eliot held back. “I’m the one gay kid in this shithole of a town. This is like, my one goddamn concession. I would do it my-fucking-self, but they put up cameras, so I can’t. I’m literally asking for this one goddamn thing.” He could hear himself sounding like an asshole, and he made it infinitely worse by rounding off with, “ _Please._ ” 

The hobo reached up slowly to peel the edge of his scarf down. His lips were deeply chapped, his face discolored with permanent sun spots where a patchy beard wasn’t covering it. He exhaled a ragged breath through his mouth. He was, Eliot realized for the first time, a lot younger than Eliot had assumed. Not a kid, but no old man, either. Probably not even middle-aged. His face had a strangely anachronistic appearance, the sort of face that wouldn’t have looked unusual in an eighteenth-century painting of a revolutionary soldier.

A feeling of familiar urgency swelled briefly in the pit of Eliot’s stomach. _Do not,_ he thought. 

The hobo reached his hand out, palm up. When Eliot passed the money over, the hobo pushed his sketchbook in Eliot’s hands and got slowly to his feet. He looked around for a moment, then headed into the store. Eliot leaned against the building’s brick facade and released a wave of anxiety and anger in one, deep exhale. 

The sketchbook in his hands was remarkably pristine. When the breeze caught a corner of it and lifted the page a little, revealing the very edge of another, even more intricate mandala underneath, Eliot flipped it over and appreciated the minute detail of it, the fine, even lines and the resplendent array of colors. Beneath that page, there was another one, and another, and then a page full of convoluted geometric shapes that seemed to fold inward on themselves in dizzying patterns. A stylized but ultimately accurate depiction of a sparrow in glittering, neon pink. A prim, long-haired cat, in green. A figure, in profile, standing with his hands in the pockets of his jacket like he was reaching for something, a curl of smoke rising from the cigarette between his lips. 

A familiar white box of Merit Ultra Lights landed in the middle of the sketch pad. 

“I’m keeping the rest of it,” the hobo said. He was talking about the change; Eliot looked up to the sight of him stashing a couple of dollar bills in his pocket. 

“Thanks,” Eliot said, hastily returning the sketchbook. 

The hobo nodded once.

“There’s some really good…” Eliot trailed off as the hobo got himself settled back on the pavement. “You’re really good at that.” 

The hobo looked up at him, spread his hands a little. “What _else_ do you want?”

“No,” Eliot said quickly. “No, this is--” he held up the cigarettes, wondering if he’d be back here begging again next Saturday. “This is good. Thanks.” 

\- - - 

The previous Thursday, Eliot had found a note scribbled lightly in pencil on his desk at the start of fourth period

 _E.,_ it said, _parking lot. 5th p._

Holden had been waiting for him, and Eliot had done a cursory check of the area before scrambling into the passenger side of Holden’s truck, ducking beneath the window while Holden had driven them some distance out of town.

Eliot hadn't forgotten how much Holden liked sex. Or how much Holden liked getting off, at any rate. Carly had been the opposite, a delicate, wait-til-marriage type, and Eliot had given their relationship three months. 

It had lasted four. And it appeared Holden wanted to make up for lost time.

They’d stretched out on the bench seat with the engine running and the heater on because without it, the cab quickly grew too cold to think. Holden didn't like Eliot touching him, but at some point he’d begun running his fingers through Eliot’s hair, murmuring, “I’d forgotten...what...you…” while Eliot sucked him off like giving head was a competitive sport and Eliot was there to win.

 _Tender_ , Eliot had thought. Holden’s fingers in his hair felt tender, not there to grip or push or pull. Not even there to guide, apparently; just there to _be_. And then Holden had whispered his name, just before coming, his voice low and soft like a secret, and Eliot, his mouth full and salty, his own name perched on Holden’s lips, determined not to come because his only change of clothes were in his gym locker, finished too.

They’d planned to meet up again Saturday, and Eliot had swung by the drug store for cigarettes beforehand only to find they were no longer so easily acquired.

 _Holden’s eighteen,_ Eliot remembered, as he collected his bike from the rack outside the library. As long as they were fucking, he’d probably be up for administering to Eliot’s addiction. Quid pro quo. No more begging curmudgeonly hobos. Eliot tucked the cigarettes safely in his pocket and rode west, in the direction of the neglected edge of town where truckers pulled off the highway to refill at the Love’s travel stop tucked between a row of old warehouses and a Mexican place called El Casa Burro. It had snowed again, for real this time, and mounds of greyish, hardened ice pack clung to the sides of the road like a mold. The asphalt had seen the underside of a snowplow, but it was still fairly icy, and Eliot steered carefully, not wanting to show up to meet Holden with a couple of bruised knees or a nice road rash on his face. 

Holden was waiting for him, leaning up against his truck, behind the partially-collapsed remains of a warehouse that had caught fire some years back and never been repaired or even completely demolished. “What took you so long?” He asked. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

 _And yet you continued to wait in the cold,_ Eliot didn’t say. He retrieved the box of cigs from his pocket and held them up by way of explanation. Sometime in the past two days, Holden had added the shell to the back of his truck, likely in response to the increasing reports of snow storms. 

At the sight of the cigarettes, he rolled his eyes. 

“Did you know the drug store put in cameras? Can you believe that?” Eliot said. Now that he was no longer pedaling, the cold had started to creep in through his jacket, and he continued to talk mostly just to stop his teeth from chattering. “I mean, mainly because I was stealing them, but. You know. Still.”

“Cool.” Holden moved around to the back of the truck and popped the tailgate down. “Bike?” He said, gesturing at it. 

Eliot wheeled it over, stepped back as Holden lifted it in. 

When they were both freezing inside the cab with the engine running, waiting for the heat to kick in, Eliot finally asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“Lake,” Holden said, dropping his hand to the gear shift.

 _The lake_ was how people from Turlake referred to the six-acre pond north of town, which was the place to be during the summer months when you could rent a paddleboard and float out to the middle with a six pack and let yourself get blissfully, merrily drunk and very badly sunburned. In the winter, it was a marble slab of ice that migrating waterfowl sometimes skidded across when they came in hot assuming they were landing in liquid. It never really froze enough to be safe to skate on, so during the winter months it was generally empty, the gravel parking lot an undisturbed blanket of snow. 

Eliot sometimes wondered if the pond was the originator of the town’s name, like someone had been passing through when downtown was nothing more than a saloon and a brothel and a general store--all three meant to serve Oregon trail and gold rush folks who were on to better destinations--and had thought to ask a local if the small collection of buildings had a name. Eliot imagined the local, an old man with tobacco stains in the corners of his mouth and beard, uneducated beyond a primary-school level, scratching his head and, thinking of the pond, answering in a stammered eureka: _uhr, dur, tur…..lake._

The view from where Holden chose to park looked out from one end of the pond to the other, over the expanse of grey ice, or at least it did until the truck’s windows were too fogged to see out of.

By then, the cab of the truck was like a very warm, very dusty little sauna, and Holden reached for the dashboard to turn the heater down until it was just a low murmur in the background. Then he settled his hands back on Eliot’s hips.

Eliot fixed his hair. It didn't particularly need fixing, but he wanted to do something with his hands to disguise the fact that they were trembling. 

They’d slid over to the passenger side, where the steering wheel wouldn't get in the way, and Eliot had climbed into Holden’s lap. They hadn't exchanged words, but Holden had gripped Eliot’s hips tightly in his hands, and afterwards had pressed his forehead to the space between Eliot's shoulder blades, the sorts of gestures that said more than language could.

Without the heat going full blast directly at him, Eliot quickly sprouted goosebumps, and he climbed off Holden finally, cleaned himself up with a few of the paper towels Holden had thoughtfully shoved in the glove compartment--preferable to the last time, in the barn, when Eliot had cleaned off with his own boxer-briefs, and biked home with them tucked in his back pocket--and made himself comfortable on the other end of the bench seat while Holden zippered and buttoned and buckled and finally pushed his hand through his hair like the gesture was the last delineation between “gay” and “not gay”.

Eliot opened the new pack of cigarettes and lit one, but kept the box in his hand to have something to turn over nervously. The sight of Holden running his fingers through his hair made Elliot’s heart leap a little in his chest. _He was_ just _inside me,_ he reminded himself, and when that reminder made his heart leap again, he thought, _oh, shit._

He hadn't forgotten Holden’s libido, or Holden’s staying power, but he had forgotten this: the fact that the more they got together, the more Eliot wanted him. The first time--the first time since Carly, at least--had been standard. Transactional. But now they’d met up three times--and counting--and looking at Holden made Eliot’s heart leap. _If we keep doing this, in a month I'm going to be insane. He could tell me to do anything and I'd do it._

“We need to talk about this,” he said, before he could stop himself.

Holden looked over. “Talk about what?” 

_Of fucking course._ “This. What this is.”

Holden reached for the pack of cigarettes and snatched it up before Eliot could get them safely out of reach. “This isn't anything,” he said, and picked one of the cigs out before flipping the box back. 

“Okay, then what is it when I haven't just asked what it is?”

“It’s nothing,” Holden said. “It isn't anything.” He looked at Eliot, briefly, his expression helpless, and Eliot felt his stupid, traitorous heart leap. Again. “It's just...something that I need. What am I supposed to do?”

“Masturbate, like the rest of us?” Eliot rolled his eyes. 

“It isn't the same.” 

“So then it's worth it to you to sneak around like this.”

Holden nodded, then shook his head like he wanted to end the conversation.

“So nothing would be different if the school slut were a girl.”

Holden frowned, apparently unfamiliar with the concept. “The 'school slut’?”

“Me,” Eliot said impatiently. 

Holden’s eyes narrowed, but the corners of his lips turned up. “You’re the school slut?”

“ _Y_ _es._ ” 

Holden made a _tch_ sound with his tongue against his teeth. “You’re not the school slut.”

“I've been with--” Eliot considered the number, considered how grossly he could underestimate it while still making it seem like a lot, a delicate balance between _Casanova_ and _Whore of Babylon_ , “--fifteen guys.” He watched Holden’s lips part, the barest margin of frank disbelief, and added, “You’re the only person I've ever been with more than once.” He thought of Parker, of Tradd, of Kevin, and amended the lie: “Like this, I mean.”

“You have _not_ been with _fifteen_ guys.” Holden was smiling, like the very notion was adorably ambitious at best. It occurred to Eliot that Holden was attempting to put the past half hour behind them, eager to make them just two friends shooting the shit. 

_You don't get to do that this time_ , Eliot thought.

“Do you not think that's possible for me, or are you just jealous that you're not special?” He asked. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Holden said. He removed the cigarette from between his lips. His smile had disappeared. 

_If I pushed him_ , Eliot wondered, _would he hit me?_ “If you're upset that you're not the only person I'm fucking, you can just say so.”

“I’m _not_.”

“It's okay if you want me for yourself.”

“That’s not--”

“I mean, that’s the only thing that makes sense, right? Why else would you keep coming back for--” 

Holden slammed his hand down on Eliot’s chest, shoving Eliot against the driver’s side door. The back of his head connected hard with the window, and Eliot could feel the arm rest digging into his spine. Holden’s breathing was shallow, patchy. He’d become a bystander to his own anger. 

_Cop-out,_ Eliot thought, and then, realizing the pressure of Holden’s hand on his chest was turning him on again, wondered, _so what does that make me?_

“For fuck’s sake,” Holden said, his face close to Eliot’s. “Leave it alone.” He released Eliot, reached for the door handle and let himself out, slamming the passenger door behind him hard enough that the windows rattled. 

Eliot closed his eyes, smoked his cigarette down to nothing in three long drags and tossed it in the ashtray. Then he picked through the pile of clothes sitting on the seat and dressed haphazardly, sliding Holden’s large Carhartt jacket on last, and let himself out into the cold.

The silence outside was a different beast than the silence in the truck cab. Holden had discarded his cigarette, and it left a brown stain in the snow near the truck. He was facing the lake, hands crossed over his chest to keep some of the cold at bay. He did not look around at the sound of the door, or the sound of Eliot crunching through the snow towards him. 

Across the lake, a flock of winter birds took off as one from a skeletal tree. In the stillness, Eliot could hear their wings beating the air even from a quarter of a mile away. 

“You're a bitch,” Holden said. His tone was strangely wondrous, almost affectionate. 

Eliot arrived at his side. His nose had already begun to run in the cold.

“It's actually kind of a relief that you're--” Holden hesitated. “Is that my jacket? You're not keeping that.”

“I'm not gonna fucking keep it. It's just...warmer than mine.” He pulled it closer around himself. “It's kind of a relief that I'm what?”

“Do you have this discussion with the other guys?” Holden asked. “Do you pull this shit every time?”

“Other guys, I just blow them and send them on their way. You keep coming back.”

“I guess so.” Holden shifted at little. “I'm not gay. At least….I’m not into dating dudes. So the answer to your question? What is this? It's fucking nothing. It's nothing but fucking. The point of you is that you're _easy_ .” He rolled his eyes. “Not 'easy’ like _easy_ , but like. Easy. No _where’s this going_ and _do you see us together in five years_ and _are you gonna propose after we graduate._ Girl stuff.”

“Guys pull that shit, too,” Eliot said, and regretted it.

“I can see that,” Holden replied. His tone softened when he added, “It's kind of a relief to know you're fuc--you’re with other guys, so I know this isn't becoming that.”

“Becoming a relationship,” Eliot clarified.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Well, it can't become a relationship,” Eliot pointed out. “You're not gay.”

“Right.”

“Plus, it's only been like a week since... How much have you been thinking about this?”

Holden delivered a dark look in Eliot's direction. “I don't think about this. There’s no _thinking_ about you. I don't want this to be _something I have to think about_. Okay?” 

“Okay,” Eliot said.

“Okay,” Holden said, with an air of finality.


	7. Chapter 7

Usually, Eileen went alone to church service, but on Sunday, Eliot went with her. 

Eileen had raised her sons Episcopalian, but over the years, they’d all sort of grown out of it, and by the time Mitchell was thirteen, Eileen had stopped insisting they come with her. And although Eliot had never felt particularly unwelcome at the church, he’d always sort of hated the feeling that being at church felt like he was sharing his mom with God. Like she was half beside him on the pew, and half in a completely separate world, communing with the divine.

This Sunday, though, he wanted the warm, crowded hall of the church, wanted the liturgies, wanted the soft shuffling of feet on the hardwood floors beneath the pews. 

He also didn’t want to sit at home, trying to read over the sound of the football game bleeding into his room from the den. 

Eliot remained silent through the Prelude, standing beside Eileen while she sang along with the assembly. When the presider prompted _Alleluia, Christ is risen,_ Eliot responded with the rest of the assembly, whose voices came together to form a monotone chorus: _The lord is risen indeed. Alleluia._

Halfway through the service, he spotted Holden’s parents, who were seated together, sans their son, on the other side of the nave, a few rows back. Mrs. Novik had a severe, beautiful face framed by her high cheekbones, _American Gothic_ with a face-lift. Mr. Novik looked like Holden, plus thirty years and an ill-advised moustache. They had no reason to know Eliot beyond seeing him around, but he accidentally met Mrs. Novik’s gaze--her face revealed her to be utterly naive to whom she was sharing eye contact with--and she smiled at him. After that, Eliot kept his gaze fixed firmly on the narrow stained-glass windows behind the pulpit.

By the end, he felt, as he always did those few and far-between times he came to church, that he was missing some essential element of personality that transformed a religious service into a swelling sense of calm and warmth. After Eileen had tucked the Book of Common Prayer in the shelf on the back of the pew in front of them, she reached for Eliot’s hand, squeezed it and said “Thank you,” but it only made him feel more guilty.

She wanted to spend some time socializing afterwards--which was fair, Eliot himself having no particular desire to return home in a hurry--and Eliot relegated himself to a safe corner of the transept, by a stack of excess chairs, where he stood sipping carefully from a styrofoam cup of overheated coffee. 

There weren’t too many of his peers at the service, which was a _praise-God-from-whom-all-blessings-flow_ -type of lucky break, but also meant whenever a septuagenarian lady spotted him standing alone, she’d make a beeline for the _dashing young man_ waiting around by himself, on the guise of keeping him company, and inevitably make jokes like _if I were fifty years younger…_ to which Eliot was never sure how to reply. Periodically, Eileen would catch his eye from across the room and hold up her index finger-- _one more minute--_ and then forget that _one more minute_ for a quarter of an hour, at which point she’d catch his eye and hold up her finger again. 

His coffee was a cold sip and small lump of grounds at the bottom of the cup when he spotted Carly. 

She spotted him at the same time, and waved, and then began to make her way over to him, her hips swaying under her dark skirt. Why did she _walk_ like that? Eliot got it: girls’ hips swayed. But Carly, by biological accident or clever design, kicked it up a notch. She was _all_ hips.

“Hi!” She said when she reached him. “Good to see you here.”

Translation: _welcome, blasphemous heathen._

Or not. Carly didn’t actually have a surreptitiously malicious bone in her body. What she did have was _hips_. Even standing there, her weight concentrated on one foot, her right hip was popped saucily, enough that she could have balanced a toddler on it, or a basket of laundry like a medieval peasant girl. 

Holden had always liked girls with generous curves. 

“Hi, Carly,” Eliot said. 

“How’ve you been?” She asked. 

“Sure,” he said, curious to see how she’d handle that one. 

She cocked her head a bit but her smile didn’t dip even a fraction, and she didn’t miss a step in the well-practiced dance of conversational conventions: “Oh, yeah? That’s good.” She paused, for the part where Eliot was supposed to ask _how are you_ , but he didn’t think to in time, and she went on: “What have you been up to? Do anything fun this weekend?”

_Your ex-boyfriend_. “Besides come to church?”

She laughed. 

“I heard you’re dating Jacob Harly these days,” he said. 

“I am!” The rest of her facial features receded behind her smile. Wide hips, wide smile. 

“Cute,” Eliot said. He tightened his grip of the styrofoam cup, forming the circle of the rim into a narrow ellipse. “So…” 

She continued to smile. Eliot’s reluctance to engage had germinated an awkward silence, and it blossomed between them. “I like your scarf,” Carly said, finally. 

Eliot focused his gaze on the goings-on happening over her left shoulder. “Thanks.” 

She moved a little, like she was going to make a break for it without further comment, but changed her mind and jerked back in his direction. “Is something the matter?”

He held up his styrofoam cup: “Coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.”

“Gotcha.” She was happy to accept that explanation, happy to get an easy reply from him. She knit her fingers together and soldiered bravely back into the conversational front: “So...what are you up to these days?”

Eliot spotted Eileen across the nave. She caught his eye, made an half-hearted attempt at an expression of pleading and held up one finger. Eliot sighed. What _was_ he up to these days? What could he possibly answer with that wouldn’t offend Carly’s sweet farm-girl sensibilities? _I’m getting rawed by your ex. I’m smoking like a chimney. I’m--_

“Looking at colleges,” he said. 

“No way!” Carly said. “Have you been meeting with Ms. Dunphrey, too? She’s been helping me work on my applications. She’s great with that stuff, isn’t she? Where are you applying?”

Eliot’s shrugging slowed her down not at all, and she continued: “I’m applying to SOU and Oregon State and Eastern Oregon University and a couple of schools in Washington. Puget Sound and Gonzaga. I think it would be exciting to get out of state to go to college. Don’t you think?”

Eliot’s _yup_ came out delayed and faintly strangled-sounding, when he tried to abort his incredulity upon realizing, a moment too late, that she was in no way being ironic.

“She’s a really great resource,” Carly added, circling back to Ms. Dunphrey. Her interest and ability to hold a conversation with the non-forthcoming Eliot was clearly waning, and she looked off and away from him for a moment, as if trying to find a polite excuse to escape. Success was only a moment away, and her face lit up. “Eric!” She called, and waved the boy over. 

Over his shoulder, Eliot spotted Eric Harly, the younger brother of Carly’s boyfriend. Eliot squeezed the ellipses of his coffee cup even narrower, and pulled his mouth out of the grimace it had slipped into.

Eric came dutifully over, tugging at the strings of his hoodie with his fingers, sucked in by the tractor beam of Carly’s affectionate glow. The hoodie appeared to be a concession on his parents’ part; out from underneath it poked a white dress shirt and blue tie combination that was much more appropriate for church. 

Under the hoodie, under the dress-shirt sleeves, Eliot knew, Eric’s arms had a dozen--maybe more, now--precise pink scars, which Eliot had had the opportunity to run his fingers over exactly once, over a year ago when they’d been alone in the locker room and Eric had so badly wanted to kiss him--kiss him and nothing else. The purest transaction of power Eliot had ever experienced. 

Now, Eric’s gaze darted towards Eliot for a second, but he must have decided it would be too unusual to avoid Carly, and he planted himself in such a way between the two of them that he didn’t have to look at Eliot at all. 

“Hi, Carly,” he murmured. 

“Good to see you here!” she said, in just the same way she’d said it to Eliot. “Eliot and I were just talking about colleges.”

Eric pressed his lips together amicably, but he was still only a sophomore, and college--if he were to go to college at all--was about as far away as the moon. "Uh-huh?" He said. His mouth was rosy, and a little damp after he nervously licked his lips. For a moment, it drove Eliot to distraction. 

_Boycrazy,_ Eliot thought.

"Do you two know each other well?" Carly asked. To Eliot, she said, "Eric is Jacob's younger brother."

"We know each other," Eric murmured.

"We had gym together last year." Eliot, expecting some sort of reaction from Eric, was a little disappointed when he didn't even blink. 

"Did you want me to go get Jacob?" Eric asked, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb.

“I’ll grab him in a sec,” Carly said, with a dismissive little wave of her hand. She glanced at Eliot, like she wanted to make sure she could get him and Eric firmly entrenched in conversation so she could make a clean, socially-conventional escape. “Are you excited for Christmas break, Eric?”

Eric shrugged. Eliot almost smiled. 

“Well, are you coming to the Christmas pageant?” Carly added, sounding slightly more desperate. She crossed her arms over her chest as if to shield herself from the fallout of the rapidly deteriorating conversation. 

“Probably,” Eric said. “If my parents make me.” 

“What about you, Eliot.”

Eliot realized he’d crushed his styrofoam cup past the point of usefulness. “Fuck no,” he said. 

Eric snorted. 

“Oh, um,” Carly said. She frowned, then smiled, then frowned again. “Well, you might really--you should really--I mean, I thought your mom was coming?” 

“That does sound like something Eileen would do.” 

“You know, it’s gonna be a great community--”

“Celebrating virgins and saviors isn’t _really_ my thing,” Eliot interrupted. He added, his voice brimming with insincerity, “But I’m sure it’ll be great.” 

Carly set her mouth sharply, and for a moment, Eliot could see the person she’d be in twenty years: the picture-perfect housewife and mother that organized PTA bake sales and pushed Girl Scout cookies and Boy Scout popcorn like a drug dealer, who had a cadre of friends who all talked shit behind her back, choking on jealousy and desperate for Carly to reveal some tiny flaw in an extravagant fashion, like suddenly losing her chill at back to school night and screaming at a teacher, or breaking down in the snack foods aisle at Safeway, sobbing and shoving yet-unpurchased Double-Stuf oreos into her mouth in public. 

Carly might not have had a surreptitiously malicious bone in her body, but Eliot was all malice, suddenly--or maybe always was--and he forced a smile that must have looked murderous. 

Eric was staring at his shoes. Carly just looked disappointed.

“I gotta go,” Eliot said, and added, lying, “It was nice seeing you.” 

\- -

On Monday morning, at the passing period between homeroom and his first class of the day, Eliot spotted Holden near Eliot’s locker, looking grim. Holden was clutching a copy of _Lord of the Flies_ , the senior English class reading for the fall semester.

There were a few people hanging around Eliot’s locker, getting their books, lingering in the hall before class, hastily passing study guide answers or bits of gossip to each other. It was the beginning of finals week, and though testing didn’t start until Tuesday, you could feel it in the air. Eliot met Holden’s gaze and ignored him. Holden wasn’t having that; he pushed his chin up in greeting and said, “Waugh.” 

Eliot murmured _fuck_ , under his breath and raised his eyes to Holden’s face. “ _What_ ,” he snapped. The girl standing by his locker looked up for a moment, then back down, completely uninterested. 

Holden proffered the book in Eliot’s direction. “You left this in homeroom.” 

Everything felt foggy and distant. Eliot’s homeroom class had been about eighty degrees, inexplicably, and it had left him lethargic, like he was moving through tar. It was impossible that the book was his. Not only was it the senior class reading, Eliot did not and would never own, borrow or _want_ a copy of _Lord of the Flies_. Early postmodernism, he figured, with its strong undercurrent of psychoanalytic themes, was--

“Waugh.” _Lord of the Flies_ bobbed up and down a little in Holden’s hand. “Take the book…?”

Eliot took the book. He opened it to the front page, expecting something like _after school, under the bleachers_ , and instead finding, in staggered, rushed letters scrawled under Holden’s name and class period, _this was in my locker. ???? we gotta talk._ On a scrap of paper--the aforementioned _this_ \--was a note scribbled in expiring blue pen: _I_ **_know_ ** _about you + elliott._

Eliot lifted his head, but Holden was already making tracks down the hall. There didn’t seem to be any good reason to call _hey, what the fuck is this?_ because Holden probably wouldn’t even turn around. Instead, Eliot dropped the book in his bag and headed off in the opposite direction.


End file.
